Every once in a while a Firefox add-on catches me off-guard and becomes quite the handy tool. This particular one, though, simply knocked me over the head, picked me back up, and shoved me down Photo Browsing Easy Street.

PicLens by Cooliris instantly transforms web photo albums into a “full-screen, 3d wall experience.” Dragging, clicking and zooming through the interface is as smooth as butter, and photos load in at speeds that still baffle me. There is also integration with all the major photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and many more. As impressive as all this is, what really makes this add-on worth its weight in gold is the fact that you can simply open PicLens at any time and perform a Google image search. No more tedious pagination. No more time-consuming page reloads. Google images simply appear out of thin air as you drag your mouse. Genius! And something I now can’t live without.

Every so often I stumble on a new tool that makes my life easier (how nice those moments are.) Hopefully this is another one of them. I just found a nifty Firefox Add-On called ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging. It basically lets you post to a number of popular blog formats, including a custom wordpress install like this one, right from within your browser. So, here is my first post (hopefully of many) using ScribeFire. Enjoy.

Moyea FLV Player
If you’ve ever tried to view a local .flv file with the default Macromedia configuration, you know that you simply get an empty flash player window. Whether you just want to preview an .flv prior to uploading it to your server, or you like to collect .flvs off of the web for local archiving and viewing, this is a great solution. After installing it, I set Windows to associate the .flv file extension, and from there it’s great. This is the best one I’ve found thus far. Other apps such as Riva do enable local playback, but lack features such as window resizing and full screen viewing, as well as the ability to save snapshots. VLC will play a local .flv file, but it will not scrub the timeline.

Notepad++
One of the most obnoxious things about Notepad is the lack of multiple undos. Notepad++ is an excellent Notepad replacement that features syntax-highlighting, line numbers, a tabbed interface and much more. You can completely customize all the code formatting for different types of files within the the Style Configurator. Don’t let the lizards scare you away! This one is a must-have.

XP Powertoy Calculator
Microsoft has released PowerToys for years. They’re basically OS tweaks developed by Microsoft that don’t ship with Windows. One that I have found to be very useful for common tasks is the PowerToy Calculator. After installation, I typically have it switched to the ‘Numerical Calc’ view. It’s much more friendly and feature-rich than the default calculator.

Royale Noir
This is an ‘unreleased’ Microsoft Theme for Windows XP that surfaced on the web well over a year ago. I have been using this for quite a while now, but I often run across people who have yet to hear about it. This has a black color scheme, and it is a variant of the ‘Energy Blue’ Royale theme that Microsoft released with Windows MCE 2005. Microsoft later released a theme to accompany their Zune media player. It is widely assumed that Royal Noir was a beta of the Zune theme. They are indeed a bit different and I definitely prefer Royale Noir.

Far too often the most effective solutions are overlooked. If you favor a lightweight, simplistic, intuitive (and free!) approach to software, the open-source communities have alot to offer you. Listed below are 10 open-source or freeware apps I use daily and I can’t imagine not having them.

• Mozilla Firefox - web browser
• ImgBurn - disc burning utility
• Pidgin - instant messaging client
• Thunderbird- email client
• Synergy - keyboard/mouse sharing
• Task Switcher XP - alt+tab replacement
• VLC Player - media player
• Azureus - bittorrent client
• Filezilla - ftp client
• Xvid codec - video compression